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Garabito writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has posted his not-so-fond memories of Steve Jobs on his personal site, saying, 'As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.' His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice."

Look, I know no one likes to speak ill of the dead and all, but geez, last week's lovefest got WAY WAY WAY out of hand. Jobs was an important figure, no doubt, but the over-the-top platitudes were often more humorous and bizarre than heartfelt or touching. There were "expert" commentators on CNN calling Jobs the "most important person in the history of technology" with straight faces. People who didn't even KNOW the guy were crying like their daddy had just died. At one point I think I saw Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper make a teary-eyed pledge to throw themselves on his funeral pyre.

I doubt Jesus' apostles were as upset after the crucifixion as some of the supposedly objective "experts" and "journalists" I saw last week. It's not like I expected them to get into the more negative and tawdry aspects of his past with his body still warm, but I didn't expect such unabashed hero-worship and hagiography either. It was just shameful.

It's not like I expected them to get into the more negative and tawdry aspects of his past with his body still warm, but I didn't expect such unabashed hero-worship and hagiography either. It was just shameful.

The media, of course, is in love with walled gardens, and are in awe of Jobs' ability to sell them. It all makes total and complete sense.

The Daily Telegraph did an obituary which went over some of his life in an unflattering way. Naturally some commenters wigged out that the obit could suggest their beloved Steve was actually a bit of an asshole.

Your post was good example of a civil way to disagree. Abusing one's moderation power to cover up someone's opinion on the other hand is an act of violence, which generally happens when someone has an agenda to push. Hence you get accusations of being a shill or a fanboi.

drinkypoo was at worst answering an act of silencing in-kind, and even that sort of accusation seems too harsh.

Disagreeing with someone is not sufficient reason for negative moderation.

Flamebait means "something I know will lead only to a flamewar", but I think that this is something that both merits discussion, and which can lead to productive discussion. I jotted off my little journal entry on the subject, which was indeed dramatically more rude and to the point, before I saw this article, so for me it was simply RMS saying what I wanted said. And I post a short comment that agrees with him and explains why? That is not flamebait. Nor is it a troll. Modding it "overrated" is just a copout. I think that moderation is actually one of the worst things about Slashdot, along with underrated. Well no shit, if you're moderating it obviously you want the rating to change. Thanks.

There is a clear argument against the term "shill", which is to stand up and say "I am not receiving compensation for my moderation of your comment." Granted, Slashdot does not make it possible to do this other than by posting in the story, but that also provides instant proof that this person engaged in the moderation, and gives them a chance to make their case as to why you should have been moderated in that fashion. If it is compelling, surely someone else will come along... and moderate the comment that they didn't like as overrated.

However, there are zero valid reasons to moderate my above comment as Flamebait. There are lots of reasons why someone might do it anyway. One of them is that they are a true iFanboy zealot who cannot bear any criticism of the holy Jobs, his turtleneck, or the RDF. (Thank goodness Guy Kawasaki made it okay to talk about the RDF, or shiny-suited agents of Apple might be knocking at my door right now, and I haven't even clicked Preview yet. Or perhaps they're simply RMS-haters and anything that agrees with him is evil. Regardless, the only other really good reason for such moderation is if you're getting paid to do it.

I try to restrict my use of the word "shill" to people who repeat the party line even when it has conclusively been proven to be false and/or irrelevant. Abusive moderation to hide a comment that diverges from the groupthink falls under aggressive maintenance of the status quo.

I'd mod you up, had I the points. I even saw a somewhat disturbing piece on one of those Sunday shows asserting that Steve Jobs was indeed the FOUR most important people to influence technology in the past half century, since calling him the single most important person was apparently already too low a tribute. Steve was clearly very influential but to blindly say that he was "The most influential in history" is a huge reach. Just because there are certain groups of people who rely entirely on his company's products (not even a majority of those who use technology on a daily basis) that group (almost all of those in national media, it would seem) feel justified in glorifying him to no apparent end.

And hey, at least RMS won't need to worry about his funeral being picketed by the Westboro folks.

I even saw a somewhat disturbing piece on one of those Sunday shows asserting that Steve Jobs was indeed the FOUR most important people to influence technology in the past half century, since calling him the single most important person was apparently already too low a tribute. Steve was clearly very influential but to blindly say that he was "The most influential in history" is a huge reach.

I think what we're seeing here is a dichotomy between technophiles like Slashdot users, and laypeople who use computers but don't understand how they work. To the open source technophile, being able to grab the source, fix a bug or add a feature, and compile it is a perk. To the lay person it's the same thing as telling them they have access to all the parts to build a rocket to go to the moon. They couldn't do it in a thousand years even if they tried, and so it's a nonexistent benefit to them - a non-feature.

Apple's allure to regular people, and Jobs' particular influence, is that they make all this complicated technology easy to use. Yeah they severely limit the tech geek in the process, but most regular people simply don't care. To them, the alternative is barely being able to use the technology at all. That's what makes Jobs one of the most important influences on technology in the minds of most laypeople (i.e. the great majority of the population).

I'm an engineer by trade and this is one of the things which confounds me about programmers ("software engineers"). One of the most basic tenets of engineering is KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. Yet programmers, and especially the Linux culture, seem to delight in making things more complicated rather than simpler. They advocate Gentoo, and express shock and dismay that the "dumbed down" Ubuntu distro is the most popular. It's ok to revel in the bits and pieces that make technology work. But for the vast majority of people, the technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself -- a mere tool. Those bits and pieces need to be as invisible as possible so these people can use the tool to get their work done.

With Jobs' passing, end users lost one of their biggest advocates for this simplicity in an industry full of tech geeks who love to tinker with the nuts and bolts. That's why the mainstream media is going ga-ga over this while tech sites like Slashdot are yawning.

Steve may not have liked your taste in ripped music, your torrented TV series, or your third party apps, but he would defend to the death your right to run them, as long as that means you will pay an Apple tax to do so.

Unless you bought an Apple TV; in that case he would have liked you to pay the apple tax on the gizmo, the apple tax on the media, as well as the media tax for "owning" a proprietary bit of content for a fixed amount of time...

It's only natural that since OS X is built over a BSD variant that there will be bits of Unix underneath for people to use. And Apple has certainly helped promote open source way more than Microsoft ever did (e.g. clang, webkit, cups etc.).

However that doesn't forgive some of the shit they've pulled with iOS and which they presumably wish to extend into OS X proper. I fully expect that when OS X makes the leap to ARM that you'll suddenly find it is as closed and proprietary as iOS is. The app store will b

Steve may not have liked your taste in ripped music, your torrented TV series, or your third party apps, but he would defend to the death your right to run them, as long as that means you will pay an Apple tax to do so.

I think you're missing the point. RMS is about free software and has defined the fundamental software liberties [gnu.org] already. Software made by Apple and that kept in its walled garden does not match those liberties. The values pushed by Apple don't even come close.

Let's not delude ourselves. As far as software is concerned, with some notable exceptions, Apple always took the hard proprietary line in order to protect and add value to their hardware. It's natural for RMS to point it out. Especially at this moment in time, in a controversial manner, because well, that's what he does.

And hell, if anybody is to talk dirt about Jobs, let it be RMS, a man every bit as influential, who has fundamentally changed things and who has his place reserved in history books as well.

Let's not delude ourselves. As far as software is concerned, with some notable exceptions, Apple always took the hard proprietary line in order to protect and add value to their hardware. It's natural for RMS to point it out. Especially at this moment in time, in a controversial manner, because well, that's what he does.

It is appropriate for RMS to point out the privacy/openness issues, but he really, really doesn't need to be so harsh to do it.

Read his words - he implies that anyone using any Apple product is a "fool" who has willingly stepped into a "jail." (Those are his specific word choices.) He has good points, but by being so polarizing, he is only pushing people further away from his own position. Rather than a few sentence rant, his time would have been better served by putting together a few thoughtful paragraphs that acknowledge the positive impacts from Steve Jobs (ie, his emphasis on usability) while pointing out the downsides (ie, software freedom, etc.).

A post like that might even cause others to think, rather than encouraging them to dismiss RMS as a crazy lunatic.

Which one of the TV channels is "The Not Stupid" channel? Because I never found it. Even the "science" and "documentary" themed channels like History and Discovery spend plenty of time on blowing shit up, credulous UFO shows and ghost hunters, not to mention "the science of Jesus" kind of bullshit.

It got a bit pathetic with people running around talking about how Steve Jobs invented the mouse, the personal computer, the smartphone, the media player, the tablet, and practically sliced bread. The guy was an excellent product designer with a good eye for where the market was going to go next. He was no more instrumental in shaping 21st century society than any other fashion designer. And yay, he was yet another ruthless capitalist, yawn!

I saw a report like that too, and was about to get angry until they showed the patent for that idiotic round mouse (ie: directionless pointing device) that came out with the iMac G3's about 11~12 years ago. Some cub reporter comes across a Steve Jobs patent for a mouse, and assumes he invented the entire industry. Never mind that it was the single biggest FAIL in the history of pointing devices.

I (mostly) like Apple products, and am thankful for Jobs's contribution to the industry. But I also empathize with

The one who pushes a new idea past the tipping point can be at least as important as the one who came up with it in the first place. Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the Internet, but without the Web it could not have become the inextricable part of life that it is today.. Henry Ford did not invent the car, but he applied to it the industrial practices (which he did invent) that put it in a position to change the world. Steve Jobs did not invent the smartphone or the tablet but it's because of him that those are now household words and we're moving towards a world where everyone carries a personal Internet-enabled device at all times, and all the technological and social change that entails. That's already shaped 21st century society more than any other person in the technology (or fashion) industry has to date.

No, I don't expect the messes to stop glorifying Jobs for stuff he didn't do and didn't even claim to do, mainly because there are still people to this day who insist on villifying Gore for claiming what he never claimed to have done.

there are still people walking around who believe we have Al Gore to thank for the Internet

It's only right wing rubes that believe Al Gore said he invented the internet. I won 5 EUROs from one such idiot a while ago. YouTube is a wonderful resource for being able to go back and see what people actually said.

Al Gore was however responsible for allocating the government money which was used to create the widely accessible internet from earlier government networks such as ARPANET. That's a fact. Whether you want to be thankful for it is up to you.

***Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn noted that, "as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication."***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore [wikipedia.org]

Dude... the contemporary news media is entirely shameful. They will do this to any story that gets eyeballs. They will wring it for every last drop of blood, then jump on it to see if it produces any more and even when it's clearly dead, they will continue to twist and shimmy the fucker until there's nothing left.

Do yourself and cut the cable. There's plenty of other ways to get your news. Or at the very least, keep it off for awhile. After awhile, you'll be surprised to find out that you won't miss it.

You know what my daughter said when told about Steve Jobs death? "Who is Steve Jobs?". Lets face reality, there was a few segments here and there about "wow this guy died and he invented technology man"*, admittedly by the odd "famous" person. But most people don't know and don't care who he was or what he did./. is not really a typical slice of the general public in this regard.

Now if Justin Bieber gets run over by a concrete mixer, you bet your ass you the media will get "WAY WAY WAY" out of hand.

The nice thing about the media is that it is opt in. You don't have to watch/read crap.

* sure the is a lot of buzz on tech based web sites etc, but that is hardly mainstream.

I made a joke on Facebook when Steve Jobs died. Something about how God was mad at him because iPhone 4S was just a minor upgrade to iPhone 4, rather than the long-awaited iPhone 5, etc etc. Some of the flames I got were seriously crazy; one girl compared Steve Jobs dying to *her two miscarriages*. I couldn't believe it.

I'm sorry Steve Jobs is dead. Really. He was a human being, and he had hopes, dreams, feelings and ambitions just like the rest of us.

But to put Steve Jobs in the same league as people like Alan Turing, or Ada Lovelace, or Charles Babbage seems... very wrong. He was imperfect in life, like all of us, and remains imperfect in death. He was just a man. 150,000 other people I hadn't met died that day too, but nobody gave a shit about them. 150,000 people I've never met died today too. If I broke down crying and sobbing for each and every one of them, I'd be a wreck.

We as a society idolize the dead. I don't believe in extolling the virtues of the recently deceased. Given a long enough time the life expectancy of all Humans drops to 0; we all die some time, and when my time comes I would much, much rather people tell the truth about me and maybe even have a bit of a laugh, even at my expense. It's not like I'm going to care, I'll be dead.

I find it completely disrespectful that people think the best way to remember and "respect" someone who's recently died is to gloss over their flaws and essentially tell lies about how grand they were.

When I die I just want people to remember the truth about me, whatever that was, not some kind of warped 1984-ish false memory of a person who never was.

Stallman should remember that he isn't just any random character fighting for software freedom. He's the self-appointed publicity figure for open source movement...

Agreed. To paraphrase Stallman, once Stallman is dead, I'll be sorry that he is dead, but glad that he is gone.

The gay movement had their Stallman in the form of ACT-UP -- people doing outlandish, socially unacceptable acts for publicity (such as throwing blood on people they disagreed with). Stallman fits the same mold. Once the gay movement grew up and ACT-UP faded away, the gay movement became far more accepted.

What was cause? What was effect? I don't care. ACT-UP and Stallman may have been needed at one point, but ultimately do more harm to their own cause then they realize.

Just to make sure I insult everyone equally, Operation Rescue -- the anti-abortion group -- also did more harm than help to their cause with their Planned Parenthood blockades.

I disagree. I'm glad the FSF has someone as uncompromising as Stallman. Even if his perceived extremism is bad for corporate open source software, it's better for the free software to survive in its current state as a hobbyist movement than to devolve into openwashing and flourish, which is exactly what corporations want, to turn OSS into nothing more than a nifty marketing label while they control the product with an iron fist. This is why I support the GPLv3 and am against any "pragmatist" ideas of allowing for Tivoization and patent traps so that companies will be more likely to adopt and use open source.

Android is a good example of what happens to open source software when corporations get their way with it. It flourishes, but so what? Who benefits from the openness, apart from the few geeks who download the source code (for certain versions) and hack it onto a few devices? To the average customer it's as closed as iOS for all practical purposes. At the end of the day, this situation is at best, no better than the stereotypical obscure neckbeard-run FOSS project critics fear the "idealist" position would lead to in terms of openness, except that a company got rich by ripping off the open source community and contributing a little code back for the uber-geeks to tinker with. And it's a good thing there are a few tablets and phones out there with unlocked bootloaders and VMs are an option or the hobbyist wouldn't be able to do a damn thing with the Android source. If Google really wanted to tivo-lock Android, nothing's stopping them.

ACT-UP and Stallman may have been needed at one point, but ultimately do more harm to their own cause then they realize.

Thank you for your concern.

Funny thing: there are huge numbers of people like you, who are always ready to tell anyone who stands up for a cause that they are doing it wrong and would be far better off just sitting back down again and not rocking the boat. There are far fewer people like Stallman who are actually ready to do the standing up. Which do you think has a more beneficial effect on society?

To put it another way: without Stallman, I would be typing this on a computer that was bound by restrictive EULAs that would prevent me from knowing how it worked or modifying it to suit my needs. He clearly knows a thing or two about software freedom. What have you accomplished that gives you the authority to claim you know better than him how to achieve his goals?

(Also, I find it bizarre that you equate issuing a press release you don't like with throwing blood at people. Really, you're going with that? Wow.)

Why's it funny, and what's the difference, I hear you ask? Well GNU/Linux (and Hurd, har har) is "free", aka viral. BDS is "open source", and that's exactly why Apple was able to bag it, build a wall around it, and make their own secret proprietary version without giving anything back to the community that built it.

...but not so much if you recall other aspects such as his denial of paternity of a daughter (with Chrisann Brennan), claiming he was sterile, then going on to father three more sprogs with someone else. Creepy.:-|

You mean because Buddhism isn't a religion and Buddha was neither a prophet nor a priest, but rather was a practicing social psychiatrist and ethicist? Like that?

But the issue Stallman is raising is that over many years, Jobs was about ownership and money as much as he was about anything else. He was not a leading light of the open source software movement. In fact, he and his company continue to be rather aggressively proprietary anywhere they can get away with it. They only moved to a Unix base because not to do so was fatal -- they didn't have a chance of developing a creditable non-Unix multitasking multiuser operating system to replace the long series of completely proprietary Mac OS's, at a time that even Microsoft was reading the writing on the wall (and MS had NT, for better or worse, and it took most of a decade to develop that to where it was capable of turning into e.g. XP and giving MS a consumer OS that wasn't doomed out of the gate.

Basically, the OSS community saved Apple's ass every bit as much as the Ipod did -- without OSX the actual Apple "computer" was dead and everybody knows it and knew it at the time (and Apple came within a hair of ceasing to exist because of it). So what, exactly, did Apple then do for the OSS community? Move to open standards for (say) music? Move to open standards for anything at all where the standards were not already dictated by the marketplace? Become an aggressive corporate presence calling for an end to proprietary software and hardware?

Hardly. Does the Ipod use a USB port to play music or charge? It does! Does it use a standard USB connector? It does not! Hence an instant, enormous aftermarket for a proprietary piece of cabling that won't work with anybody else's anything and that gains no particular benefit from the difference. Over decades -- printer cables, modem cables, mouse cable -- if it was Apple only Apple's version would fit on an Apple piece of hardware.

Software no better. I personally am neither glad he's dead nor glad he's gone because either OSS can make it on its own in spite of people like Jobs and Gates and companies like Apple and Microsoft or it can't, but Jobs was in a position to do the compassionate and ethical thing at least a time or two in there and I would not say that his corporate business decisions properly reflected the general Buddhist philosophy or ethos.

It was, and remains, all about the money and power and influence every bit as much as it was about the joy.

Jobs and his company are based entirely on control of other people's property. You can't put the OS on your own hardware, you can't run your own apps on the iPod Touch / iPhone without hacking it, you can't use products which directly compete with Apple's offering on either either (heh). Are you all forgetting iTunes prior to the catalogue being converted to DRM-free MP3s?

Horrible people can do good things just as good people can do horrible things, and a lot of the things Jobs did in computing were horrible. Pretty, and king of usability, but all a thing veneer on something fundamentally malign.

I've always loved how "it was because of the record companies". You know, that clearly was the truth, especially with how Apple refused to license their DRM to third parties which would have then allowed one to migrate their media collection to a non-Apple product. Yes, I'm certain that Apple had no interest what-so-ever in a vender lock-in, where if you moved away from their products your entire media collection, and all that money you spent would effectively have been thrown away. And Apple removed the

... but I agree with stallman. Jobs figured out that you can make aesthetically pleasing stuff and make a lot of profit off simplifying hardware design for everyday people BUT this has a negative effect on those who actually use computers and computing devices as something beyond a toaster or glorified television. Jobs just turned computing devices into consumer items. The downside is that his companies success with walled gardens is giving a lot of other companies and developers the same idea of creating walled gardens where you never own anything, can't modify it, etc. A kind of kind of feudalistic computing.

I've watched gaming go downhill over the last 10 years with the rise shit like world of warcraft showing everyone the path to walled garden land because there are enough stupid people who don't give a shit about gaming that will just take it up the ass because they aren't passionate about games. So we get things like Starcraft 2 chained to online, no LAN, we get permanent online DRM being pushed and crap like onlive. At this point I really want to burn down the software industry. I remember a time when blizzard wasn't as evil as it is today and you actually were treated like a customer rather then a magpie with a wallet.

In the same way, people who work in computing, and do computing and are passionate about computing need freedom from corporate tyranny to innovate. Each generation of tinkering kids becomes the next set of developers/entrepreneurs/innovators. To lock everything behind a walled garden just creates a big mess and ensures solutions are suffocated or co-opted for someones personal greed with a net negative for humanity as a whole.

All great innovations are built upon mountains of others that came before them, locking them down is just a surefire way to suffocate progress.

for ReadWriteWeb to find a new editor, one that doesn't pander to fanboys

Steve Jobs was also in part responsible for a lot of bad, remember the Foxconn worker 'suicide'? Or how about suing journalists? Or hiring security that pretended to be police? Or requiring employees submit to searches or be fired?

With that out of the way, he speaks true. I abandoned everything Apple for exactly the reasons he pointed out and I hope, as Stallman does, that Apple will become less anally retentive in the future.

Stallman is that guy who takes his job way to seriously. He loses touch with reality, he loses friends, his only friends are those with the same goals, but he even dismisses them for not being as committed as he is. In the end Stallman does the real work needed by the FOSS movement, he benefits the movement greatly, however he's like the overnight shift in a 24 hour production facility. Often the very best workers are on the overnight shift, not because you don't want the secrets to their efficiency accidentally leaked to someone passing through, but because the most talented people are often such eccentric weirdo's you only want the results of their work seen, not the workers themselves.

That last article condemning Stallman was just completely out of tune with the man himself. He wasn't hateful towards Job's himself, Stallman has a goal in mind and he wont rest until it's accomplished. He will never accomplish it. His goal of all software being 100% open source, patent free, and free in every way will never happen, and it's one of the places I differ with him. I support someones right to make money off of software, I do agree FOSS is the way to go and I do think even closed source software should eventually become open, but I do support someone closing source for a time to make a profit, and this is where I disagree with Stallman, who I see as an Old Testament Prophet of the Open Code.

Just because Jobs was innovative, popular and successful doesn't mean he was a saint. Considering his closed hardware platforms, Jobs showed us that his views were perhaps even more the antithesis of the FOSS movement than those of Mr. Bill.

What is it about FOSS that inspires such blind arrogance that they shoot themselves in the foot? Stallman is hurting his cause, just as a Mozilla employee recently hurt their cause -- by feeling and expressing contempt for those who don't share their vision, and by lacking respect, decency, maturity, and basic business sense.

Unfortunately it raises doubts about the competency of some FOSS organizations. If they don't have the understanding to respect other points of view, or the sense to do simple things in their own self-interest, who can rely on them?

I strongly support FOSS. It depresses me that so many leaders needlessly damage the cause.

I would agree with most of the people who are upset with RMS over this if it weren't for the way in which the media overreacted to Jobs' passing. I know it's typical to focus on the positive aspects of a person's life after they die, but the media rose Steve Jobs to the level of a god. They focused on his revival of Apple while ignoring the fact that he had a big part in its original downward spiral. They exalted Jobs' focus on good design principles while ignoring the fact that he created a corporate culture of trying to sue all of the competition out of the market. They trumpeted the success of the iPhone and iPad while ignoring the walled gardens they created. It's not my place to say whether or not Jobs' presence in the market was a net positive or negative, but I think it's fair for the media to cover both sides of a person's life as long as it is done with tact.

What's Jobs guilty of? Making products that people want to buy, at prices they want to pay. Leading a company (or really a bunch of companies) that did some outstanding engineering that led to some incredible products that people really want to buy at prices that were on the high side, but people still willingly paid them. You (and the free software movement in general), with the help of the Unholy St. IGNUcius, of the Church of Emacs, are welcome to try to produce a product that people like better. However, if Emacs is any indication, I think you have a ways to go.

All due respect to the deceased, and his family. But that company is/was horrible from an ethical standpoint. They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but they put a lot of people out of business for trivial copycatting. From the cookie shop in NY ( if I recall) being sued for making iPhone cookies, to the carpenter sued for making decorative wooden iPhone plaques. I don't know if any of those cases made it to court, but that's not the point. They sued the living hell out of anybody that even looked at them wrong without permission. Not to mention the ongoing suits against the rest of the technology world, so many lawsuits open right now I cant even recall. Jobs was a huge proponent of defending his copyrights, but he very often took it WAY to far. For example, attempting to enforce patents on touch screen gestures? Really? I actually like a lot of Apple hardware, they certainly have their place in the industry, but they will never be more than a niche marketing firm until they pull their heads out of their asses. RIP jobs, despite all his failings as a ethical human being he was a brilliant marketeer and business man. I give respect where respect is due but otherwise; while am certainly not happy that he is dead, I AM glad that there is now somebody else at the Apples helm. Hopefully Mr Cook, has a bit more common sense with the company going forward.

This comment on the readwriteweb.com article was so good I decided to paste it here:

Stallman is the anti-Jobs in many ways. But they"re both brilliant, driven, uncompromising geniuses. And to say that Stallman hasn't had as much impact on the world as Jobs is wrong on it's face, in my opinion. I reckon more devices have Linux installed than any Apple OS. How many startups would have been crushed by server OS costs without GNU/Linux as an option, even just by driving down the price of competitors? How many pieces of software that started as hobby hacking wouldn't exist with a free C compiler? App store? Linux had this years before the iPhone? Safari's engine started in KDE. Mac interface descended from X. Super-computing, internet plumbing, all dominated by Linux and GNU for a reason. Then there's Android.

If you don't like him, Stallman gives you plenty of ammunition. The same could be said about Jobs (personal emails to disgruntled users?) He spoke his mind, and a lot of people may not like what he said. In his mind, the world of software is a secret war for the freedom of billions of people. He believes proprietary software is a precursor to real live Soviet style oppression. He thinks Jobs is/was creating the world that appeared in the iconic 1984 Mac commercial. And if he believes that, blunting his words would be a disservice to history and posterity.

Steve Jobs was one to the most powerful on the planet. He's gonna have enemies. He knew that and didn't much care. I doubt his family is surfing Stallman's website looking for an epitaph.

As for the spokesman thing, I don't see RMS as that. He's the visionary. He's supposed to be unbending, uncompromising, theory based. He's not supposed to sugercoat. He's a coder, not a CEO.

Interesting choice of words. I'm not sure if "Mr. Bill" is a reference to Bill Gates or Mr. Bill from Saturday Night Live [mrbill.com]. Because I actually think SNL's Mr. Bill does deserve to die. Have you seen what they do to that guy? Every episode they're either running him over or chopping off some body part... they should just let him rest in peace. And in pieces, in his case.

Of course, now this makes me wonder if SNL's Mr. Bill started out as someone's sick commentary on Mr. Gates. Perhaps the creator's computer blue-screened when Office tried to load Clippy, and he started composing these skits while he waited for the reboot. "It looks like you're trying to write a letter. What you do is-- OH NOOO... I got a paper cut and it severed my arm! Oh NOOOOO...."

Jobs wasn't a great innovator in technology, but he was a pretty great salesman and marketer. One of his greatest marketing campaigns was convincing people that he was some sort of fantastic technological innovator.

His second great achievement was having a pretty plastic shell designed for a bucket of computer innards and then charging double over the nearest competing product, and actually making sales.

Third, he recognized the power of good design in both the interface and the a fore mentioned pretty plastic shell. While I've listed this third, it is probably his greatest, longest lasting, and closest to technical innovation. Apple, as a company, really gets design. It shows in every single one of their products, and often times has won out over functionality. I wish more companies got design at the same fundamental level, but integrated it better with function.

Fourth, Steve Jobs managed to get a whole generation to believe that they were thinking differently by purchasing the same computer.

RMS talks about greed and freedom. But this is the man who insists on renaming somebody else's operating system, Linux, to GNU/Linux because they used his free shit to make it. So what is it Dick, is your shit not really free? Linux owns the trademark for Linux, the and GNU is owned by your cronies.

Does that mean that if I come up with my own kernel, lets call it Assfuck, using your GNU shit, calling it GNU/Assfuck is appropriate?

Job was a visionary, zealot, and a control freak who demanded things his way. That made him a dick. But RMS is also a visionary, zealot, control freak who demands things his way as well; that makes him just as big a dick as Jobs.

Stallman was just voicing his long and honestly held beliefs that a free and open software environment is a major benefit to society, and that closed systems such as promulgated by Jobs is not in people's best interests, but is only in the best interest of those who own the system - Jobs/Apple in this case. Yes, Jobs was a brilliant visionary and executor of his vision, but that vision was to limit people's choices to those he approved of. If our government were to do that (oops, they must have read his book) we would be up in arms...

Meh. Stalman only cares about "sustainable" freedom. Apple, and Jobs, were NO champions of that cause. We all know the very good things about Apple, but Stalman keeps in mind the BAD things, such as extreme vendor lock-in, anti-privacy instances, market lock-in (closed app-store, anyone), extreme censorship against FLOSS, hostile behavior towards other companies and hostile behavior towards competing products...

We are already screwed if people take Stalman as the corporate image of Linux. But that doesn't mean the guy is wrong.

Err... doesn't OSX contain fairly substantial amounts of FLOSS, and isn't Apple known as a reasonably responsible licensee and even contributor for most projects they use? I recall a few instances where they were accused of a license violation, but they seem to respond to most of these accusations by correcting whatever they've done wrong. Granted, not always instantly, but they do fix it.

The problem that people have with RMS is that he points out all of the things that people would like to ingore for the sake of expediency. People don't like being exposed as foolish. People don't appreciate enlightenment. People can't handle being confronted with the things they try to hide from themselves.

I'm not exactly fan of Apple, but Richard Stallman has no merits to basically say he's glad Steve Jobs is dead.

There is no merit (see what I did there? In case you didn't, I used the word correctly) to the assertion that someone who has said they are not glad someone is dead is glad that they are dead. I am not glad that Jobs died either, but I am glad he won't be at the helm of Apple Computer, Inc.

I've never been able to understand why these periodic "Stallman says something many people don't like" stories always involve so much strawmanning and apparent confusion. Like him or not, Stallman has been highly consistent for decades in his take on all things software freedom.

Shockingly enough, he isn't a big fan of the man who built what is perhaps the most powerful walled-garden presently in operation... I don't understand why that is a surprise...

I've never been able to understand why these periodic "Stallman says something many people don't like" stories always involve so much strawmanning and apparent confusion.

I see that as beyond obvious, if not necessarily simple: Stallman is the head of a "dangerous" (read: influential) movement which confronts people's sensibilities and challenges the status quo. A lot of people have significant personal and economic investments which are threatened by the movement that Stallman represents, and as its figurehead he must be discredited or his words must be considered and both financial empires and carefully crafted illusions designed to permit ongoing behavior harmful to society and self will disintegrate.

Shockingly enough, he isn't a big fan of the man who built what is perhaps the most powerful walled-garden presently in operation... I don't understand why that is a surprise...

Yeah, it's almost like he's interested in Software Freedom or something.

The funny thing is, though, that Steve Jobs is not a parent to anyone here. He is a complete stranger, but has been elevated to such a messiah like stature that people that didn't even know him outside of his press releases literally went out of their way to buy fucking flowers and leave them at the Apple Store.

I think the lack of perspective most of these mourners display is the most discouraging thing. I read a few "Man, that sucks" comments and didn't have a problem, but when people call him the most i

Indeed. Steve Jobs used to make blue boxes to steal from the phone company. Not 'steal' in quotes, actual theft of service. Using actual long distance lines without paying for them.

A lot of people did it for fun, which is somewhat reasonable, I guess. It's one thing to hack on the phone system for fun. I can shrug at that.

But Jobs actually manufactured blue boxes and sold them to others, people less interested in 'phone hacking' and more interested in 'free long distance calls'. Well, Woz built them and Jobs packaged and sold them. That was his first 'user interface', making blue boxes usable and affordable for random non-hacker people. Probably with nice curved corners and a shuffle version that didn't allow you to pick the number to dial.;)

I.e., he was the equivalent of a hacker selling script kiddie tools.

And, years later, Steve Jobs also sold fucking phones that people couldn't install whatever software they wanted on them. Not even something illegal, not something harmful, just people who wanted to play ScummVM games or whatever on their phone.

I don't know exactly what happened in the years between those two Steve Jobs, but I'd also be glad he was gone from Apple if I suspected he was the cause of the walled garden in iPhones. (However, I have actually no evidence this is the case, and I'm not sure why RMS thinks it is. And he was pretty much 'gone from Apple' already from what I understand.)

Jobs changed after his return to Apple, it became less about enabling people and more about his vision and only his vision. Enable people as long as it's within Apple's rules, and when the rules change, you better agree with Apple.

No, The problem is that software is not in the same league as human rights and freedoms. Software choices don't kill or enslave people. Individuals developers have always had the right to publish their work any way they want regardless of any licensing. Stallman has been consistent but the problem is he has been a consistent asshole who thinks he is saving the world with his software development model. Of course he already has the financial resources that enable him to totally ignore how his theories effect those actually working for a living.

Exactly. It's the old power vs freedom problem. Pursuing absolute freedom is stupid: when you increase someone's freedom at the expense of the freedom of someone else, you are not increasing freedom globally.

The freedom to harm others (physically or, in Stallman's view, by depriving them of the right to change the software they use) is better called "power", and that is not desirable in itself.

Stallman does, and always has, define freedom as that which most benefits him. He is or was a programmer and he demands the freedom to program and modify the software and devices he uses. Which is great for him.

But how can the freedom to choose not include the freedom for people to choose an Apple style 'walled garden'? I am absolutely certain that Stallman doesn't know what I want better than I do.

Further, if you don't buy any Apple products, how can you be effected by Apple? Apart from your not being able to buy a tablet that apes an ipad in countries that don't allow products to ape one another. Also other than getting angry enough to click reply on every Apple/Jobs story.

But how can the freedom to choose not include the freedom for people to choose an Apple style 'walled garden'?

Some "freedoms" which involve the sacrifice of a particular freedom are not permitted. For example, you are not allowed to sell yourself into slavery. Whether you think that walled gardens are heinous enough to merit such disapproval or not is a personal thing. Many persons considered slavery to be quite acceptable - for others.

Further, if you don't buy any Apple products, how can you be effected by Apple?

In much the same way as properly paid workers are affected by a slave labor force. Some occupations are thus priced out of the market, as they can't compete with subsistence-level workers (there would be openings in other occupations, such as slave driver). Becoming locked into a walled garden is generally a one-way trip, so the walled garden tends to expand to the detriment of the open market. You appear to think that this is harmless; it is not, largely due to the degree of control and squelching of competition that occurs in Apple's walled garden.

What you call a walled-garden is just a trading platform. Apple as a provider of that trading platform, controls what can be traded, but not what you in fact trade.This is no difference to drug laws or other laws that prevent "free trade" of certain goods.

The big difference is that Apple is a private entity and is controlling what can and can't be sold via a store that they own. They do not control what you can buy in other stores, as would a government.

If you dislike what is available in Apple's store or you have some philosophical disagreement with the way they do things, you are free to buy some other device.

Becoming locked into a walled garden is generally a one-way trip, so the walled garden tends to expand to the detriment of the open market.

No, I have an Apple phone and an Apple laptop, my servers run BSD. I have a DVR that runs Linux. The day a non-Apple phone or laptop, or non BSD server OS, or non-Linux running DVR, becomes available that suits my needs better than what I have, I'll use them instead.

Tell me specifically how the degree of control and squelching of competition specific to Apple's walled garden affects things outside the walled garden. Tell me about something with enough scale to justify you being able to deny my freedom to ch

Freedom doesn't mean "anything goes". Freedom means recognition of the fact that a person owns their own body, and that a person is entitled to exclusive use of his own property. All freedoms stem from those two axioms, and all tyrannies stem from the violation of those two axioms.

The more proper question is, "Why do people think this shit is unacceptable?" Hey, it's my phone. If I choose to look at gun porn, I'll do so. If I choose to look at motorhead porn, I'll do that too. Geek porn? Got it covered. Phatbroad porn? Well - I'll take a pass on that, but it seems some guys like phat chicks. Just leave them alone, alright?

So, a massive cerebral hemorrhage, a bullet to the head that left him a vegetable, a mental degenerate disease, or even something that just left him physically too debilitated to continue to do his, job, would have been fine with Stallman. Read the entirety of what he wrote, and you'll see that there's no other interpretation.

06 October 2011 (Steve Jobs)

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

Stallman is no longer relevant, and his latest whining just underlines that.

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

That was a incredibly poorly thought remark. The FOSS movement is a political movement as much as a technological movement. In politics, what you say and how you say it matters. FOSS already have the drawback that is composed mostly from nerds lacking social skills, to have the most visible mouthpiece of the movement expressing himself so poorly is another unnecessary obstacle. He could have said:

"Despite his death and economical success, I still believe that the vision of Steve Jobs in computing is a menace to fundamental freedoms now an in the future. I have sympathy for his family in this moments of loss, but I can't ignore the dangerous effects of his work."

Instead, what he wrote is more akin a what a teen would post to twitter after doing a tantrum. It is simply too low for the man that wrote the GPL and "The right to read".

People who view Apple as an enabler of freedom are those who think the same thing of their EZpass for road tolls. Someday, they will see their "internal passport" as an enabler of travel.

The fact is, that the "1984" campaign was a propaganda ruse. Jobs and Hertzfeld and crew were already working with DARPA and the spooks.

Read all of the following - including the links - and understand that it is no exaggeration to understand that with the introduction of "Siri", George Orwell's "Telescreen" is on the verge of reality - in your pocket.

Stallman wants people to provide software in the way he and his flock want it provided. How people use it is irrelevant. His point is that in an open ecosystem, people can choose to use software however they like, whether it's by connecting to monolithic vertically integrated software stacks or by striking out on their own. Apple didn't provide the choice; if you wanted Apple UI, you had to buy into Apple's whole product line, because you had no other options, particularly on their mobile devices.

Not only is there wisdom in knowing precisely what to say, there is also wisdom in knowing when not to say it.

The time to make the statement is while it is relevant. You wait until the initial storm dies down, and then you start your own. And it is critical that we receive this message — not you and I, maybe, but as many of the wide-eyed legions of Apple as can be reached. Because what Apple represents is precisely the same thing that Microsoft or Sony represents: a dearth of choice. Stallman might be an egotistical ass, but he is certainly the foremost champion of the rights of the user. Some programmers don't like that, so they don't like the GPL, and they don't like Free Software. They call it a virus and they would prefer to stamp it out rather than have to deal with something so confusing.

Other people can make the same point in a month, and a year, and reach other audiences, but this point needs to be made now and it needs to be made well. Stallman has done both.

And it is critical that we receive this message -- not you and I, maybe, but as many of the wide-eyed legions of Apple as can be reached. Because what Apple represents is precisely the same thing that Microsoft or Sony represents: a dearth of choice. Stallman might be an egotistical ass, but he is certainly the foremost champion of the rights of the user. Some programmers don't like that, so they don't like the GPL, and they don't like Free Software. They call it a virus and they would prefer to stamp it ou

You don't have to have liked him, but you could have at least shown some respect rather than making the GNU (And by association, Linux, even though we hate you) community look like tools, instead of just yourself as you usually do.

Except that RMS is absolutely 100% spot on correct in his assessment. Some people (like you) just don't want to hear it. Nothing new here, really. For the record I am an ex Apple fanboy from roughly the Apple IIe days through OS8 when I finally gave up and moved to Linux on account of it being friendlier to software development.

Interesting indeed: I was, by contrast, quite proud of Stallman for this statement. I thought it was concise, respectful, yet completely honest. That takes a lot of guts, especially when public opinion is swinging a very different way. To give a point by point rundown Stallman does the following in this statement:

Acknowledge the tragedy of Jobs' death

Acknowledge the tragedy of death in general

Acknowledge the success of Jobs' in the marketplace

Acknowledge Jobs' as a pioneer in computing

States that Jobs created a proprietary ecosystem that ultimately deprived users of computing freedom

With which, other than the last, do you have a problem? And with the last point, do you honestly disagree? Or do you just think that people shouldn't speak honestly about the faults of a man after his death?

Stallman who made Linux possible. No I won't call it FNU/Linux or whatever.

Stallman who made Steve Jobs mac OS possible... Without the GPL license, and applied in a dual license, a lot of the MacOS show-offs wouldn't have been there... Have you ever hurd of Safari, just to mention one.

Still, Stallman has made is an enormous impact on planet Earth, quite possibly much larger than that of Jobs. Stallman is just the unhurd of version of Jobs, and w/o turtle-neck. The GPL (which has Linux as a subset) made it for a hurd of other free software licenses as well.

Stallman's contributions stand on their own, whether or not correct and/or not politically correct.

Stallman didn't make Linux possible, BSD did. Are you suggesting no other compilers or debuggers existed?

Stallman didn't make MacOS possible. Again, BSD did. Safari doesn't use any of Stallman's code, and if LGPL didn't exist (a license Stallman wasn't a fan of), another would have been used.

Stallman's contributions are gdb, hot air, and beard grease and the only reason gcc/gdb became popular is the same reason UNIX became popular: it was available. Apple doesn't even use gcc anymore and its days may be numbered.

Steve Jobs wanted to make a computer for everyone, Stallman couldn't give a damn how difficult they are to use so long they use his license.

HURD:0 Apple:Billions

The only reason you've been modded up is because of FSF zealots who have nothing better to do than troll slashdot. If people rated your post on the facts you would get a -5 flaimbait

Stallman's worst defect (other than his nonconformist appearance and manner -- which are both fine by me, but not great qualities in a spokesman) is his faith in the general intelligence of the world at large.

He leaves things unsaid, because he assumes that the audience is paying proper attention, and reading between the lines.

Case in point:

Stallman's ideal vision of a world where every user is a programmer that reprograms their devices at will isn't happening for too many reasons to list

You don't need to be a programmer to program a computer. My boss isn't a programmer, yet he can program a computer simply by paying me money and telling me what to do. My mum isn't a programmer, but she can program a computer by asking me a favour. Stallman assumes people realise that.

Steve Jobs isn't generally well liked, perhaps people like Bill Gates like him, but that's because they actually met. Most people, just know him from the product announcements and ass kissing articles in various papers.

RMS is getting flack for it, but somebody really needs to point out at this time that he did a lot of underhanded things as well that undermined the ability of people to use their hardware as they see fit. I'm not sure who else has done as much to promote the walled garden model to the masses